Letting Go

The attention paid to grasping in early life has overshadowed the other manual activity that is learnt much later: the ability to let go

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Childhood is filled with attempts to differentiate our feelings. Fairy tales tend to offer neat partitionings of good and evil, and children are usually eager to identify who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. This initial taste for division grows more complex over time, so that a good part and a bad part may be located within the same character. If Disney’s Frozen introduced a romance between Anna and Prince Hans, with the danger situated in sister Elsa’s ice-dealing hands, we discover that Hans actually has selfish and even murderous intentions himself. I have listened to many young children trying to explain this, to make sense of a goodie turning bad, whereas for older viewers the contradiction is more bearable.

We might wonder, indeed, if Disney’s pun is intentional: if a negative force is first embodied in Elsa’s hands, as the story unfolds it becomes localised instead in the handsome Prince Hans. The point of malevolence might move from a body part to a character, but it retains the same phonetic consistency: Hands – Hans. As Elsa learns to use her own powers for good, there is still a bad Hans.

There is certainly a time in childhood when we have to leave the one we are most attached to, and the seemingly erratic behaviour that this dilemma produces often mystifies the parent. The child will run away from the mother and then cling to her, dispatch her coldly and then beseech her for an embrace. Games like It are perhaps treatments of the same problem of proximity and distance: we run away from the one we long most to be with, and it is significant that the privileged point of both contact and contagion here is the hand.

We could also think of many narratives in which two people are on the run, bound together by handcuffs. They are nearly always characterised by an initial antipathy — cop and criminal, liberal and bigot, innocent and guilty — and yet as the story moves on, a bond of respect or love is established between them. There is often also a moment when one of the two has to decide whether to free the other party or not. Some danger to both of them appears, and there is a crucial decision to be taken, relying entirely on trust. If they free the other, will they turn their weapon on their liberator or, on the contrary, use it for mutual defence against the approaching danger?

Like the games of It, this plot line is predicated on the image of a union followed by a separation. The union, however, is not chosen but enforced, a fact of circumstance, whereas the separation is an act of choice, and it is between these two moments that the emotional bond between the characters crystallises. Having their hands joined and then released is the framework within which the unstable and agonising fusion of love and hate can — in fantasy — become disentangled.

Later on, classroom crushes may aim to mitigate this same pain of ambivalence: there is just one unique object of adoration. Rather than confront the unsettling and volatile mixture of affection and reproach towards the parents, a purer form of infatuation is created. But beyond and beneath this is always the disturbing alloy of opposed feelings. The same person that we seek comfort from and depend on is also the person that we must separate from.

If, at one level, we are terrified lest we be dropped, there is perhaps an even greater terror that we will never be released. The creature under the bed is not just a monster but, more precisely, a monster that grabs us, with a grip that offers no release. The same grip that we needed so much in our infancy now becomes the symbol not of security but of capture. And yet without this threat, how would we be able to separate from our caregivers? Do they need to become monsters?

The attention paid to grasping in early life has overshadowed the other manual activity that is learnt much later: the ability to let go. If clasping is initially a reflex action, releasing is not, and must be learnt over the course of at least the first year. Aristotle could write that “the business of the hands is to take hold and keep hold of things,” but the emphasis on possession neglects this crucial metamorphosis. When infants manage to build towers by stacking boxes or cubes, the most difficult moment is not holding them and placing them but, on the contrary, letting each one go so that it doesn’t topple.

Voluntary release is hardly a given here. To let go of something, the flexors are inhibited, and this is not easy for children during the first six months. To release a cube in tower-building, for example, the contact of fingers and opposed thumb has to be broken simultaneously. Dropping is thus an art to be learnt rather than a natural reaction. As well as knowing how to open the hand, the timing has to be correctly judged. In their first efforts at lacing shoes, children often pull out the lace as they withdraw their hand.

It is interesting to observe that so many of children’s earliest games revolve around the oscillation between clasping and letting go. In one example, an eleven-month-old boy emptied out a box of cotton reels and was trying to put them back one by one, yet the reel would consistently come out with his hand. He was unable to let it go. Clasping was overriding release. When his sister called him, he looked up and the hand opened, allowing the reel to drop back into the box. Things were smoother for Freud’s grandson Ernst, who was able to hold onto the cotton reel, throw it, and then pull it back in the famous Fort-Da game.

This one-and-a-half-year-old boy started by taking any small objects he could find and throwing them away into a corner or under the bed, emitting a long “ooooo” as he did so. Freud heard the word “Fort” (gone) in this sound and assumed he was playing “gone” with them. One day he took a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it, throwing it over the edge of his curtained cot so that it disappeared, once again saying “oooo.” He then pulled the reel out of the cot again with a joyful “Da” (there). The game consisted of a disappearance and a return.

While his mother was out, he found a way of making not only the reel but himself disappear. Using a full-length mirror, he would crouch down in order to make his mirror image “gone,” as the mirror did not quite touch the ground. This was a child, Freud notes, who could tolerate well his mother’s absences, and “gone” was one of his first words. To compensate for her absence, Freud thought, he was staging the disappearance and, later, the return of objects. Where he was passive, he made himself active: from being the one who was left, he had turned himself into the one able to manipulate presence and absence.

But throwing the object away may also, Freud adds, have satisfied an impulse for revenge, as if to signify to his mother, “All right then, go away! I don’t need you!” Indeed, a year later, when his father was absent due to military service, he would take a toy and hurl it away, shouting, “Go to the fwont!” Isn’t there a difference here between throwing and letting go? Many children are able to push things away before letting go of them, as if the rage or defiance in the first action has to be spent to allow a genuine separation.

Language preserves this distinction, as we speak of “letting go” of something that has troubled us only once we have managed to go beyond our anger or the intensity of our attachment. The fact that we perhaps let go less often than we should shows how difficult this process can be. It is ironic that we are continually instructed in contemporary culture to “move on” and “let go,” and yet a whole set of more dominant imperatives simultaneously requires us to be even more attached to whatever we do — from a pointless training exercise at work to a gym class.

Job applications today have to be accompanied by a letter of motivation, demonstrating that whatever tasks the work involves, they will be met with unbridled enthusiasm and energy. Motivation here becomes something to be turned on or off at will, rather than an enduring part of one’s relation to one’s interests. School and college graduates today are in fact increasingly unlikely to find employment in their chosen field, and motivation itself thus loses any connection it may have had to its childhood sources.

If the infant Frank Lloyd Wright could play with wooden building blocks and then go on to create buildings, a comparable trajectory is generally ruled out today due to well-known changes in the landscape of employment. At the same time, the worker or job applicant has to show absolute passion for the job they don’t want to do. Note how, in advertising and branding, the accent has shifted from the product — our ice cream is delicious — to the worker’s relation to the product — we’re passionate about ice cream.

If we meet a salesperson, they smile and bubble over with enthusiasm for their hand-crafted, hand-stirred, hand-flavoured product, and then we learn a few weeks later that they have moved on to another, totally different company where they are now showing an overwhelming and all-encompassing passion for… another product. Rather than a rhythm of attachment and loss, we have a rhythm of attachment and attachment.

It is obviously no surprise, then, to find the emergence of depletion and depressive states punctuating the forced buoyancy and positivity required in modern life. With no time or space to “let go” properly or for feelings of loss to be adequately worked through, they hit us from out of the blue, and we often have no idea where they could have come from.